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Minimize Harm and Security Risks of Nuclear Energy

NRDC works to reduce the dangers of nuclear energy in every form, from uranium mines to warheads to waste piles.

Our environmental experts and litigators sue the Nuclear Regulatory Commission when it fails to consider full environmental impacts in licensing uranium mining. And we push the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to strengthen standards for uranium mining, as current regulations have failed to protect the environment against contamination from past and present operations. Our work also includes, blocking nuclear reprocessing for energy, and developing a scientifically sound deep geologic repository for spent nuclear fuel.

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Our physicists and nuclear energy experts urge U.S. regulators, as well as the entire nuclear power industry, to examine the public safety consequences of severe accidents triggered by unexpected floods, fires, earthquakes, and explosions. Our advocates are pushing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to better avoid and reduce the impacts of nuclear accidents at the 99 operating reactors in the United States by increasing safety requirements of nuclear reactor licensing and creating ways for people to monitor radiation in their environment.

Our weapons experts continue to assess the global stockpiles of nuclear warheads. We conduct workshops with the Institute for USA and Canadian Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences to examine the future of U.S.–Russian arms control. We are urging both nations to discuss requirements for small, stable, “minimum deterrent” forces and to clarify the role of missile defense systems. In that vein, we advocate to strengthen nuclear arms control and reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons. And we work to make existing nuclear arsenals safer by increasing nuclear warning and decision times.

WASHINGTON (March 11, 2014)—On the third anniversary of the devastating nuclear accident in Fukushima, Japan, the Government Accountability Office today issued a report on how nuclear regulators in the U.S. and 15 other countries are responding to the lessons learned in that disaster.

WASHINGTON, DC (March 7, 2014)—Three years after hydrogen explosions wreaked havoc in the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is still not adequately protecting American nuclear reactors from the risk of similar hydrogen blasts in a severe accident, according to a new report by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).